Private Spaces
by PrettyArbitrary
Summary: The relationship between Sherlock and John plays out in the intimate spaces.
1. Prologue

Response to a delicious little prompt on the Sherlock kink_meme.

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><p><strong>Prologue<strong>

What they both know is: the world is anonymous. It's full of people and things and seething trackless oceans of irrelevant data. Lives are nothing but noise in that cacophany. It's others knowing you that lifts you out of the background static and makes you real, and practically no one _sees_ anything. Two people who take the trouble to notice one another in a crowd are as good as alone in the throng.

And that's fine, really. It's better than fine, because being real involves so many obligations, and obligations are exhausting and confining and sap you of all the things you are deep down where you don't _want_ anyone to see. And where, to be fair, mostly no one else wants to either.

They see each other. That's reality enough. They are both alone in the world, but they're alone together.


	2. Chapter 1: Introductions

**Introductions**

"Are you alright?" That's honest concern John can hear in Sherlock's voice. Thus dies 'sociopath' still-born. "You have just killed a man."

John would like very much to dodge this bit. If there's anything more awkward than killing someone, it's talking about it. But Sherlock refuses to be put off, and he's not just guessing. What he _is_ doing is watching John and talking to him like they're the only two people in existence. In the middle of a crime scene surrounded by about fifty policemen, of whom the closest is Lestrade himself, the ferocity of Sherlock's attention falls around them like a privacy curtain, denying the existence of anything beyond its boundaries.

John feels like he's in a confessional. This expression Sherlock's turned on him, a man might tell it anything, if he were mad enough to trust the mind behind it.

"That's true," John admits after a moment, stepping into that room built for two and closing the door behind them.


	3. Chapter 2: Blood

**Blood**

The corpse is a young man, a boy really, athletically gifted but yearning for a career in the arts. If his parents had been less intent on forcing him into their narrow conception of success, he wouldn't have made himself a target by resorting to the subterfuge that let him participate in the local theatre troupe.

"The killer mistook the victim for gay," Sherlock informs Lestrade.

"He wasn't?"

"No. He just liked acting. The killer misread the motives for his furtiveness."

Sherlock can see tension snapping across John's shoulders where he's crouched over the body, though no one else is bothering to pay him any attention at all. They're all focused on Sherlock.

He adores it. Everyone always worries about _Sherlock_, when between the two of them, he's not the one who 's proven himself capable of killing. Lestrade is so lucky they aren't inclined toward crime. Between Sherlock's mind and John's _ordinariness_, they'd be unstoppable.

Just now, though, what no one else is bothering to spot about John is that something about this murder has its claws into him. The victim suffered significant burns; the obvious answer would be Afghanistan, but…no. The victim's youth…ah, Harry.

Of course. The killer is targeting youths of heterodox sexuality. The stresses on John's relationship with his sister are old and well-worn, growing out of the drinking which most likely dates from when Harry first came to grapple with her sexual preferences, typically puberty or young adulthood. If he were pressed, Sherlock would place it at puberty, given the siblings' behavior patterns. She was young enough that John was present for the beginning of it, which as she's older by three years means she'd not yet left for college. Which means that he grew up watching her struggle with her sexuality and endure discrimination for it. Probably faced some himself as well, by extension.

In short, John is imagining his sister burned and bled out on the floor.

Lestrade is babbling nonsense that's better left unheard, so Sherlock leaves him to it. He walks over to stand before John, who sits back on his haunches and looks straight up at him.

Sherlock doesn't get along with his sibling, either, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't eviscerate anyone who messed with him. In the extremely hypothetical case that Mycroft wouldn't have already peeled them and hung them on hooks in some eminently deniable dark room, of course.

Wait. Deniable dark room… Oh!

He smiles down at John with what he knows is a wolfish show of teeth. "I know where the bastard's operating from."

John's eyes kindle.


	4. Chapter 3: Abuse

**Abuse**

Home at last from his shift at the practice, John drops into his favorite chair with a heaviness befitting a man as old as he feels just now. "Have you ever dealt with child abuse, Sherlock?"

Sherlock's eyes flit blankly from his test tube to John, then narrow at what they observe. John supposes he does look rather harrowed. "The clinic. What happened?"

"I saw a little girl today with a scald burn on her arm. You'll be so proud of me." Exhaustion twists the tone of his voice from wry to bitter. "Something about the splatter pattern didn't sit right, so I took another look. Sure enough, she had other marks. Nothing obvious, but I'm pretty certain her da's been at her." He rubs at his face, looks up through his fingers at his flatmate. "I have to file a report, but I already know they'll tell me it's inconclusive. There'll be a row over it with the administration because they won't want legal responsibility for filing on a dubious case of child abuse. God knows if I'll have a job next week." Not to mention little Margery, but he tries not to think about that because he wants to hit something badly enough as it is.

Sherlock is unreadable, occupying the kitchen doorway with a test tube in his hand and his face a sharp-eyed mask. John sighs into his hands. "This is what it's like to be you all the time, isn't it? To wonder what the hell is wrong with everybody because even if you lead them through it by the hand, they'll still refuse to see. Because it's easier to deny the truth than deal with it." He drives a heel into the floor with a _thud_ that carries through the beams of the house. "God dammit!"

Sherlock's lips compress at the show of temper—irritation, but John doesn't think it's aimed at him. He's tolerated a lot worse from John than stomping, for one thing. Sherlock turns away to set the test tube down and turn the kettle on. "The world is full of idiots, John." Ceramic clinks as he reaches up to fetch down two mugs. "I find it's not worth my time to worry over whether they're going to hurt themselves on the sharp edges of their own stupidity." His eyes slide over in John's direction, a cold spark in their depths. "In this case, however…you never know what a closer study might turn up."

Whether Sherlock is outraged on the child's behalf or on John's, John hasn't the foggiest. Either way, he smiles gratefully when Sherlock hands him a cup of tea and then flings himself elegantly into his own arm chair—not spilling a drop from his own mug—to pick John's brains.

The fact that Sherlock can and on occasion does make a pitch-perfect cup of tea is a secret John can never be induced to tell.


	5. Chapter 4: Blind

**Chapter 4: Blind**

They tumble to a halt in the shadows of an empty arch in Vauxhall, trying to suppress their panting in order to listen for pursuit. Sherlock presses them both back into deeper darkness, looming over his shorter flatmate to hide the pale smudges of their faces.

Their breath mingles in the pocket of warm air between them. Their pursuers don't catch up immediately, hesitant to enter the dark vaults under the railroad lines. Wise of them. It would be a lovely spot for a trap if Sherlock had only foreseen this chase. Waiting for their aggressors to approach, John and Sherlock struggle to master themselves, heaving chests subsiding as their pulse rates slowly fall back toward resting. This close, Sherlock can feel John's heartbeat drumming against him, always a little faster because he's smaller. He's in excellent shape, though, really; it was unjustly good fortune to acquire a colleague who could keep up with the running.

He feels John shift against him, settling his weight to a more balanced distribution in case they need to move quickly, and then Sherlock leans into him, stilling him against the wall as footsteps finally enter the arch. These men are armed and, tonight, he and John are not. Hiding is their best chance. He wraps a hand around John's brow and eyes, so that he can see between Sherlock's gloved fingers and over his shoulder without his hair giving them away, and they both stop breathing.


	6. Chapter 5: Deaf

**Chapter 5: Deaf**

The violin is heaving and sobbing, shuddering and laughing, trilling and crashing and screaming and hissing and it has been doing this for going on three hours now. It's shaking in Sherlock's hands like an overwrought lover.

Sherlock is playing in spite of John, not for him. No one plays like this for anyone but themselves, and Sherlock normally avoids an audience for these sessions. But the way he's flinging himself at the music tonight, John highly doubts anything is real to him beyond the wood under his chin and the bow in his hand.

So, as long as he sits quietly and doesn't draw attention to himself, John can listen.

Sherlock spent the first hour or so picking through his repertoire: Paganini, Bartok, Mendelssohn, Sinatra, Rolling Stones, Talking Heads. It was nothing unusual for Sherlock in a thinking mood—and "Sympathy for the Devil" turns out to be really rather spectacular on strings—but omewhere in there, they transitioned from compositions into this expressionistic _thing_ he's doing now. The effect is like…well, if someone had their vocal chords removed and replaced with a violin, John supposes that communicating with that person would be a lot like this.

That is, if that person were also in the habit of screaming their innermost emotions at the world. It's quite…beautiful is not the word. Frightening may be closer. Transcendant? It feels like spying. Or no, it feels like surgery, like the course of duty has placed in John's hands these secret interior things meant to stay closed away and protected from the world.

He doesn't know what Sherlock is doing. He doesn't know what Sherlock is thinking, but he knows right now how he feels. It's unbearable. It feels wildly, recklessly exposed, and John wants it to stop almost as much as he suspects Sherlock needs to do this. Since Sherlock won't stop, John will sit sentry on his friend as long as he has to, until this peculiar mood ends and Sherlock resumes his own defenses.


	7. Chapter 6: Dumb

**Chapter 6: Dumb**

It's so untidy when they both manage to get captured at the same time.

The gags make verbal communication impossible, but they're well past needing words to converse. John meets Sherlock's eyes and, through the flat steadiness of his expression, indicates that he contacted Lestrade before he was taken prisoner. He also, through a really unnecessary wrinkle of his nose, expresses his displeasure with Sherlock at his persistently dodging the Met's attempts to stay in touch and keep track of him during investigations, because if he'd just bloody well _talk_ to Lestrade once in a while, they wouldn't be in this mess.

A discreet return wrinkle of his own nose points out to John that if Sherlock made a habit of keeping the Yard informed of his movements, then it'd get just a touch inconvenient to suddenly drop of the radar when circumstances call for a judicious bit of housebreaking, wouldn't it. And also, is this really the time to be critiquing Sherlock's management of his casework?

He gets a quirked eyebrow back. Oh, honestly. John gets sarky at the least appropriate times.


	8. Chapter 7: Thaw

**Chapter 7: Thaw**

Drowning is not fun. John never had to worry about drowning in Afghanistan. He especially didn't need to worry about drowning in the Thames in February. "I don't think you could find a more miserable death for me if you'd been looking for one," he tells Sherlock ascerbically as he delivers his tea.

Sherlock's hands snake out from under the blanket he's cocooned himself in, then withdraw back under cover with their steaming prize. John settles down next to him on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket of his own. A hot shower, a fire in the hearth, and a beautifully scalding cuppa, and he still feels like he was just excavated from the inside of an iceberg. It must be a psychological thing.

"How long are you insisting we torture ourselves?" Sherlock grumbles.

"Oh, I'm sorry," John says with deliberately obnoxious cheer. "Did you want to sleep? Are you _tired_, Sherlock, why it's only been 48 hours non-stop up one side of London and down the other, that's positively light duty for you-"

A truly menacing snarl cuts him off. "That was for a _case_. Now the case is over and I want to _sleep_, and you are keeping me up with medical fear mongering!"

"It's not fear mongering," John tells him with what he thinks Sherlock should appreciate as nigh-saintly patience after the weekend the man's just put him through. "It's secondary drowning. Twelve hours, Sherlock, and even after that you should make certain there's someone nearby in case of emergency for a couple of days."

"I have someone for emergencies," Sherlock growls. "He's currently tormenting me with sleep deprivation."

He's tormenting both of them, in point of fact. John hasn't slept any more than Sherlock. He just whinges less about it. But he finds himself obscurely touched by Sherlock's complaint, which takes the edge off his irritation over rehashing this argument. "Between us we got about half the Thames down our lungs. I know you only care about things that kill people after the fact, but I've gotten rather attached to us." John pauses for a bracing sip of tea. "By all rights we ought to be in hospital, you know."

Sherlock emits a noise that isn't so much a sound of disgust as the distilled essence of it, balls himself up and flops sideways to form a giant purple and white clot in John's personal space.

John serenely rests his tea on Sherlock's shoulder, and bends down near the curly head. "It really was pretty marvelous," he mutters like he's sharing a confidence, "the way you sussed out who ended up with the necklace. And if you hadn't predicted that trap and pushed us into the river, we'd be crispy critters." It's crass flattery and they both know it, but it works. He sternly forces down a smile at the way Sherlock uncoils from his resentment almost despite himself. "I owe you my life, you know," he purrs, just this side of caricaturing himself. "Again."

"Elementary," Sherlock mutters into his thigh, but he's smiling. John can't tell whether he's preening under the ego-stroking or if Sherlock's laughing at him.

For that matter, he could hardly care less. He John slumps sideways and curls around the warm ball of Sherlock so the two of them form an afghan-covered lump. "You keep promising to tell me about some of your early cases," he cajoles against Sherlock's hip, his voice a blatant promise of further praise.

Sherlock laughs and allows himself to be manipulated. "You're a gallant, John. Fine, then, have I ever mentioned Reggie Musgrave…?"


	9. Chapter 8: Bullets

**Chapter 8: Bullets**

John comes down from his shower wearing nothing but pyjama bottoms and water, dripping from the little tongues of hair still plastered to the nape of his neck.

Sherlock sits up from the sofa like a hunting dog, biting back his smile when John catches sight of his expression and stops in his tracks in the doorway. He's visibly and quite wisely considering backing away slowly and then running for his life.

Recklessness wins the day. John enters the room. "What is it?"

"I've been wanting to see your bullet wound." Sherlock is vaguely aware that the ferocious greed in his voice is inappropriate to the situation. Most people would reserve that tone for phrases like 'I've been dreaming of kissing you' or 'I want to make you come.' Most people are pedestrian.

John is not pedestrian. He spreads his arms with a resigned grin. "Well, come on then."

Sherlock bounces to his feet to loom enthusiastically over his shorter flatmate. "Good man, John! You know how seldom I get to study physical trauma on living subjects? People are so prudish about their scars. It's ridiculous, you know, they're simply a biological phenomenon."

John shakes his head, amused. "Don't gloat, Sherlock, it's unseemly." It's easy enough to comply when Sherlock's got better things to occupy his attention. John doesn't protest the fingertips running over his skin. Engaging multiple senses always produces more complete information on a subject. Sadly, licking John would probably be over the line. He's half-tempted to try it, just to see what the other man would do, but the chances highly favor John shoving Sherlock off and storming from the room in irritation, with a somewhat distant second-place possibility of a punch to the face. More importantly, the odds of his ever letting Sherlock try this again would weigh in at 'vanishingly small.'

John eyes him suspiciously. "What's so funny?"

"I'm wondering if I could get away with licking you."

"Absolutely not." But it makes him laugh, which is why Sherlock told him.

His skin across the shoulders and chest is pale gold, a fading legacy of days gone shirtless under Afghanistan's sun. Scars stand out vividly against that gilded backdrop. Sherlock taps across a stippling of pallid marks around one bicep. "A youthful skirmish with barbed wire. Quite the young hooligan, John." Fading pink crescents at his wrists indicate recent restraint by means of zip-tie. No deduction needed; a matching set decorates Sherlock's own wrists. Swooping silvery threads across John's ribs speak of a fine knife or scalpel, applied at leisure with no attempt at resistance. Sherlock traces over the elegant curls, eyes careful on John's face. They're either marks of torture or an intense sexual encounter; not something he'd welcome inquiries into, either way, but then inquiries are hardly necessary. John's pupils betray the answer before he blinks and looks away.

They both pretend Sherlock saw nothing.

And there on his left shoulder is a tidy little thumbnail-sized oval, an asteroid impact in miniature just under his clavicle.

Sherlock circles it with a thumb by way of comparison. "You're lucky you still have your arm."

"I'm lucky I'm still alive." Their fingers tangle as John swipes at it, as if trying to wipe it off. Self-conscious after all, then. Sherlock can't blame him. He must have heard a hundred variations on the refrain of "Well, that doesn't look so bad." Idiots, all of them, leaping to erroneous conclusions without the least idea of either ballistics or anatomy. Sherlock splays one hand over the wound, estimating the temporary cavitation created by a bullet slamming into human flesh. It would have crushed a five to eight centimeter-wide path of nerves and blood vessels through his shoulder. The hydrostatic shockwave would have spread wider; damage to shoulder ligaments, probable fractures to the clavicle and the scapula. With three major nerves, the anterior tips of the lungs (contusions to lung tissue likely; he draws his fingers down to the top of John's left pectoral), and an artery only centimeters past its point of divergence from the aorta, John is right: it could easily have been fatal. Odds were wildly against his coming away with such minor permanent damage. Had he been anything but a surgeon, he could consider himself unscathed.

Sherlock peremptorily spins him, heedless of John's complaint, and halts him where he wants him with a hand on his other shoulder. "The exit wound."

It's larger and messier than the entrance wound, of course, an irregular, slightly raised five centimeter ellipse of pearlescent scar tissue at the inner edge of his shoulder. "Nicked the medial border of the scapula," Sherlock mutters, trailing his fingers along it. John shifts irritably under the touch—ticklish—but lets him get away with it. ".30 caliber, from the looks of it."

"You're cheating," John accuses, making an effort to come off unimpressed. "You know the chances were it was an AK-47."

Sherlock sniffs at him. "Full metal jacket," he says pointedly. "Fortunate for you they were compensating for the body armor." No fragmentation; the bullet had only just begun to yaw on exiting. If it'd been a soft-point round, it would've torn John apart from the inside.

John growls and twists under Sherlock's grip. Startled, Sherlock realizes he was digging his fingers into the muscle. He kneads the spot apologetically. "You were with a convoy. Were they targeting the vehicles, or did they know it was transporting medical personnel?"

John shrugs. "I never found out." A twitch of his shoulder expresses how he'd gotten distracted.

Sherlock continues mapping the route of the bullet and its devastation across John's skin, mesmerized and unsettled by the awareness of how close they came to never meeting at all. John stands quietly for him until he finishes.


	10. Chapter 9: Silence

**Chapter 9: Silence**

John bolts upright in the dark, panting. The echo of his own voice is dying off the walls of his room and Sherlock is a tall shadow in his doorway.

"Alright?"

John collapses back into the bed clothes and lets himself breathe too fast. Easier to just hand himself over to it, let his body get it out of its system. Sherlock's eyes see everything. John doesn't try to fight those either.

He remembers nights waking up like this in a lightless bedsit, choking on fear and isolation and almost yearning to have the nightmare back because inside them, at least he hadn't been alone. Inside, he didn't possess hindsight of the futility of it all, that the end result of all his struggles to survive would be an aimless existence in mind-numbing beige room-for-rent in Clapton.

There's no room for loneliness under Sherlock's sight. John knows he doesn't even have the privacy of his own mind right now. The relief overwhelms him.

"Your PTSD isn't from the gunshot," Sherlock says because he knows he's allowed. He knows a voice will be welcome. He knows he can see the things John can't say and so John will answer.

He comes in and sits down on the end of the bed when John shakes his head in confirmation, swallows thickly to open his throat for the words. "My section was captured in the highlands. They had us for two weeks. Kept me alive because I could treat them." He holds up four fingers, unable to make his voice work. Of those four who'd survived, he'd been the only one who could still walk when they were rescued. There's no way to talk about what had been done to them, about watching his teammates be murdered while he was held back from them. He hadn't been allowed to treat his own people. Couldn't even take their pain away. He would have been killed too, eventually, the last to die once their captors were finished with him. Or, maybe not. His skills are so very valuable in that part of the world. There's an outside chance they might have traded him off for a tidy profit. As in all walks of humanity, some guerillas are fundamentally more decent than others. These had not been very nice people.

Sherlock's expression doesn't change, that same silent fixation John remembers from the night he'd shot the cabbie. John loves him a little bit for that.

"What is the desert like?" Sherlock asks.

John tells him.


	11. Chapter 10: Treachery

John is a traitor.

They have committed many wrongs against one another in the course of their relationship. Some were necessary. Others sprung from their respective flaws. But the way John has attempted to kill him tonight, Sherlock cannot forgive.

"This is your fault." Curled up defensively in the back of a cab, Sherlock wraps his arms around his middle and groans, wondering whether he'll split open on the way up the steps to the flat. "You trapped me." There are words one does not say to a paternal Italian chef if one wishes to escape alive. 'Sherlock hasn't eaten in three days. Feed him up, would you?' are at the _very top_ of that list.

John and those round damned eyes of his, brimming with that murky, melancholy weariness that grants him command of grannies, young children, and women who like small dogs. "You _tricked_ me," Sherlock accuses. "You said you didn't _want_ to go to Angelo's." He doesn't dare raise his voice. He might vomit. Or explode.

"Yes, well, if you'd listened to me, we wouldn't have gone to Angelo's, would we?" John replies comfortably, settling down into his slightly snugger-than-usual jumper, which looks like it may have the magical power to ease the pain of an overstuffed belly. Sherlock covets it.

Angelo proclaimed, "You will eat like kings!" and then fed them like Henry VIII, laying forth a bounty of experimental Italian cookery: dishes he'd been meaning to test, newly mastered techniques, beloved Tuscan dishes from his childhood that are too…Italian for most Londoners to appreciate. He fed them like they were his own sons recently returned from a political prison in Sri Lanka, and there was no saying no to it. Angelo, when he wants to be, is a force of nature; a hurricane redolent of basil. He was born to be someone's grandmother.

They reach the staircase at Baker Street, and stare upward, somewhat more daunted than if they were facing down a hardened murderer.

"One step at a time," John mumbles to himself, and suits action to word, laying a hand on the banister and tackling the risers with all the gritty determination of a Sir Edmund Hillary.

"I feel like a hobbit," Sherlock grumbles, following him with what he's aggravatingly aware is less than his usual grace.

John jerks back toward him. "You know what a hobbit is?"

"No, John, I have no idea, but television advertisements inform me that they waddle after feedings."

At the top, blessedly, there is a sofa. A fantastic wonderland of sprawling cushions where Sherlock can arrange himself _just so_ and then lie as still as possible until his digestive processes come to rescue him from his purgatory.

John makes tea, and hands him a mug. Sherlock stares at it. "Are you _insane?_"

"Drink it, Sherlock." He rolls his eyes. "It'll make you feel better. Trust me."

"The last time I trusted you, I was nearly murdered by a cook who's supposed to be _on my side_."

John shoves Sherlock's feet a little back, and then sits on them, settling back into the sofa's padding with a relieved sigh. "No. That would be the last time I asked you to do something, and you pointedly did the exact opposite. I can hardly be blamed for your being a contrary bastard. Drink your tea."

Sherlock scowls at it—it's black, yet another violence against his person—and then drinks his tea.

It does help.

Perhaps he'll forgive John _eventually_. The lampredotto was admittedly astounding. And Sherlock's feet are marvellously warm where they're tucked under John's thighs.


	12. Chapter 11: Screaming

The violin is sobbing, and not in the good way. It sounds as though the poor thing's voice is about to give out entirely under the torture Sherlock is inflicting on it. It's the sound of razor blades being taken to a man's mind, of thoughts devouring themselves in cannibalistic fury.

It is 4 am.

John pads downstairs to watch the lean body sway to its own frenzied rhythms under the sulphurous glow of the London night. Sherlock's eyes are closed, and John is glad, because right now he would burn alive under their intensity. He listens to the sounds of Sherlock's brain and doesn't interrupt till the music pauses.

"Where can a man go in London to hear himself think?" he asks then, and holds out Sherlock's coat.

Sherlock shows him.


	13. Chapter 12: Pillar

Sherlock is balanced on the fourth floor banister of an open stairwell, Lestrade is shouting like he's someone's mother, Anderson is shouting like anyone cares what he has to say, Donovan's death-grip on the railing is all that's restraining her from pushing Sherlock over, and John is laughing.

It's all inconsequential noise, except for that last. It isn't precisely John's carefree laugh, but it isn't his 'I'm laughing to keep from shouting' laugh either. He's in a wide stance with hands hovering to either side of Sherlock's legs, laughing up at him like he's never seen a more ridiculous stunt and he's halfway tempted to try it himself.

Knowing John, that's quite possibly the case.

Sherlock has never had a friend; not the real kind. He has had many acquaintances and often been laughed at, but seldom kindly. He's never seen the point in self-pity. After all, he can silence his critics easily enough, and he's capable of enough cruelty to send the most vicious heckler running off in tears. He was never helpless against 'friends' like Seb. He chose them, used them for his own purposes every bit as much as they did him—for company, for distractions, for an extra set of hands, for a warm body. For his own entertainment. He got what he wanted, they got what they wanted, and it was, in the parlance of people who live that kind of lifestyle, a fair trade.

This, though, this open unself-conscious joy in the face of Sherlock's existence, is something new under the sun for him. No one but John has ever given him this: not his 'friends,' or his enemies, or his habitually subtle relatives, of whose affection he may be assured, but that doesn't mean they know how to have a good time.

He grins breathlessly down at John. "You'd better hold on."

"What? What-?"

John yelps and grabs his shins, and Lestrade and Donovan both start swearing a blue streak, as Sherlock bounces up on the balls of his feet and manages to hook his fingers onto the ledge at the base of the fifth floor gallery. "There, you see? Someone of approximately six feet could have managed it, or a brave man of 5'10"." One hypothesis proven right; he may as well see how many he can rack up. He tilts his chin down to John. "Would you like to try?"

"No!" Lestrade shouts, overriding the expression on John's face that's hovering halfway between dubious and amused. "You've proved your point, now _get down_ before I have you arrested for tampering with a crime scene!"

John doesn't wait for arguments. He grabs Sherlock's waist, yanking and stepping back at the same time, bringing Sherlock's weight down on him and taking it like a short blond supporting column. It feels disorienting and weightless and risky, and now Sherlock is laughing too.


	14. Chapter 13: Weapons

John has a gun pointed at his head.

He's not too happy about that, but it's not his number one priority just now. Because Sherlock's got hold of the gunman's partner, and his white-knuckled grip on the man's throat is the only thing keeping the criminal from taking up a new career as a Rorschach test on the pavement six stories down.

"Sherlock," John says carefully, then pauses to grimace because it bloody well hurts when someone grinds a piece of sharp-edged metal into his temple. "Please don't kill that man." It's a struggle not to slug the wanker who's shoving the muzzle of a weapon into his head when John is trying to _save his partner's life_, ta very much. Not, mind you, so much out of a healer's encompassing love for humanity. It's mostly because he'd prefer that Sherlock not shove a man off a building.

"I won't," Sherlock says as coolly as if he weren't literally holding someone's life in the palm of his hand, "if Renault there lets you go."

The gunman—John had thought his name was Renoir—snarls audibly. "You let _us_ go, Holmes, and you'll get your friend here back safe and sound soon as we're shut of you."

Now is not the moment to point out that, judging by the nuclear sunrise lighting Sherlock's eyes, there's nowhere on the planet these two men could run that he wouldn't hunt them down. That knowledge warms John's belly. It's been a long time since anyone cared about him like that.

But he still doesn't want to see Sherlock shove someone off a roof. He's fairly certain it wouldn't be the first life his friend has ever taken. He's equally sure, Donovan's gibes be damned, it _would_ be his first murder. Assuming the fellow doesn't choke to death first. John's a big enough man to admit when he's impressed. It can't be easy to hold a person all but suspended by their neck while managing not to strangle them.

"Sherlock, let him go," John tries again, and this time the wince that follows stems almost entirely from Sherlock's enquiring eyebrow. "Yes, alright, poor choice of words." Renoir—Renault—apparently objects to John's testiness, from the way the front sight bites into his skin. A bead of what's probably blood slides down his face, itching obnoxiously. Naturally, he daren't move his hands. Being a hostage is rubbish. "I'll be fine. You know I will." _Trust me,_ he insists with a lift of his chin.

Sherlock's eyes narrow with the kind of deadly intensity that presages bombs going off. Then, with a twisting heave, he hurls the second man to the safety of the rooftop.

Renoir used to be military. John knows this because a military man is trained to react to sudden, violent movements, just like Renoir—Renault, _whatever_—does when his pistol twitches, just for a breath, away from John's temple.

John breaks his captor's grip with an elbow to his diaphragm, and then spins to drive a heel viciously into the side of his knee. If it doesn't break, then some ugly things happen to the ligaments. That's the kind of pain that results in a bloke not resisting when you take their gun away.

He takes two paces back and glances at Sherlock, who's got one elegantly shod foot planted between the other guy's shoulders so as not to be disturbed while he takes in the show.

"Before you critique my form," John tells him, "I'd like to point out that I now have a gun."

"I don't have a gun," Sherlock reminds him. "You could give it to me."

If that had ever seemed like a wise idea, the indefinable hint of crazy around Sherlock's eyes just now would convince John otherwise. "No. You'll shoot him."

"I wouldn't _kill_ him."

John doesn't waste his breath vocalizing the negative. Sherlock takes out his frustration with a nasty little kick to Other Guy's neck that puts him down for the count. John shakes his head disapprovingly. If anyone but Sherlock had kicked someone like that, they'd be dead. "Sherlock? What's his name, anyway?"

Sherlock's eyes flick from John to the unconscious partner to the criminal-not-named-after-a-painter, who is groaning and staring at them with the air of a man striving to kill via brainwaves. "Paul Harris. Renault's younger half-brother. "

No need for Sherlock to ask why John wants to know. _Because I want to remember who you almost killed for me._ When John meets his eyes, Sherlock 'hmphs' and looks away with a little smile on his face.

Which reminds him. John frowns and looks around questioningly. "Hey. Sherlock?" He waits till he's got his flatmate's attention back. "When are the police due?"

"Oh. I suppose about fifteen minutes after you call them."

"Sherlock!"


End file.
